The saga involving Spain’s public funding of certain Spanish football clubs took a new turn on 26 February 2019, as the General Court of the European Union overturned the European Commission’s (“EC”) ruling that FC Barcelona had received unlawful state aid from Spain.…

As part of a continuous attempt to move away from geoblocking and towards a Digital Single Market (“DSM”), the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council agreed, last 13 December 2018, to facilitate access to sports radio content within the new EU broadcasting rules, a move which the Premier League has criticised. This comes much to the sports industry’s surprise as EU lawmakers and national governments had explicitly excluded sports coverage from…

On 15 January 2019, the Fédération Internationale de Natation (“FINA”), the gatekeeper for access to the Olympic Games and World Championships, announced that swimmers are now free to participate in race meetings that are organised by independent organisers (which includes those that are neither related to FINA or members of FINA) and will not be banned from competing in major championships as a result of doing so.
This statement comes after three international champion swimmers,…

On 31 January 2019, economists at the UK Competition and Markets Authority and London School of Economics published a new working paper on the effect of mergers between NHS hospitals on patient harm, stating that “a hypothetical merger to monopoly would, on average, be associated with a significant increase in harm rates”. These findings have been published amidst several recent NHS hospital merger clearances by the UK competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority…